Fixing the News: Blockchain-Powered Solutions for Media in Crisis

The advent of digital news has seen yet another wave of similar criticisms, as it had soon become apparent that, contrary to early internet enthusiasts' expectations, the new media ecosystem does not quite eliminate the disparities in communication power.

Most of the contemporary media criticisms converge around one point: the digital news economy.

Labelled the "Attention economy," the incentive system that social media news feeds have engendered rewards content that attracts eyeballs and generates clicks.

A handful of blockchain-driven media startups that aspire to revolutionize the news economy are different in this important sense.

The following review focuses on a more specific set of projects, which explicitly address some problematic institutional aspects of the current news media system.

CivilA self-described decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism, Civil is designed to solve the problem of "Broken news" by addressing the deficiencies of ad-driven media economy.

Community governance will thus entail keeping tabs on content producers and creators of any add-on tools or applications, as well as ensuring the quality of specific news pieces.

Decentralized News NetworkDNN's stated mission is to provide an infrastructure for factual political news that will be impossible to manipulate, infiltrate, or take down.

Media SifterMedia Sifter aspires to offer an environment for news consumption where attention economy is replaced with what its creators call "Evidence economy." Unlike Civil and DNN, Media Sifter's main focus is not on production of the original news but rather on community validation and investigation of the outside content.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of these particular enterprises, there is little doubt that production and consumption of news is yet another industry that blockchain technology is about to shake up.